The latest installment of one of the highest-rated strategy series of all time, Galactic Civilizations III challenges players to build an empire that dominates the galaxy through conquest, diplomacy, cultural hegemony, or scientific research.

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Early Access Game

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Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Stardock has always believed in extensive pre-release testing periods for our games. Involving our fans earlier in the process allows us to gather crucial gameplay, design, and balance feedback. Getting the game out on thousands of machines is a key part of hardware compatibility testing for us as well.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Galactic Civilizations III will be in Early Access until May 2015, according to our current schedule (which is of course subject to change).”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Currently, the beta is fun but incomplete – though it’s getting close! The story-based campaign and the tutorial are the only major features yet to be added, and they likely won’t be available until the final release. The AI will continue to improve throughout the beta, and balance and polish are never-ending tasks.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Multiplayer is fully functional. All core gameplay systems are armed and operational, from empire development to fleet combat, diplomacy, and planetary invasion. The biggest improvements between beta and release at this point will be AI improvements and improved balance.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“Galactic Civilizations III may be part of promotions both during the Early Access period and after, but the base price will remain $49.99.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We’ve already gotten a ton of valuable feedback from our community, both on design/gameplay issues as well as help in tracking down bugs. We actively monitor the forums both on Steam and at http://www.galciv3.com, and we do weekly livestreams at noon Pacific time every Friday at http://www.twitch.tv/stardock where lead designer Paul Boyer shows off internal builds and answers community questions as well as soliciting feedback on specific design points that we’re actively working on.”

March 26

Almost there! Galactic Civilizations III Beta 5 adds a ton of features, content, and polish to the game as the 1.0 release begins to peek over the horizon.

All the factions are now ready to do battle, as the mysterious Thalan Contingency and reclusive Iconian Refuge join the beta. In addition, custom factions can now be created so you can finally make that peaceful race of artistic mechanical monstrosities you’ve always wanted.

The truly ambitious can try their skills on our final two map sizes: Excessive and Insane. Be warned that they are appropriately named.

Minor factions now appear on the map, quietly toiling away on their homeworlds with nary a care in the galaxy, just waiting for someone to stop by and make friends and definitely not invade their juicy high-class homeworlds with a fleet of dropships that darkens their alien sun.

Pirates infest the inky void, causing trouble for anyone passing by.

New Game Pacing and Research Rate options let you control the speed at which a game of Galactic Civilizations III develops.

So much more awaits, from the new diplomacy screen to trade resources to modding support to new nebula art to ship combat roles. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

February 16

The Galactic Civilizations III Beta 4 Patch 2 is now available and players can now download the patch via Steam. This is the same patch that was offered as an opt-in last week, but is now available to all players. This update fixes a number of crashes, stuck turn fix, and various other fixes.

Galactic Civilizations III Beta 4 Patch 2 Changelog

Major Crash/Stuck Turn Fixes:

Fixed a crash within Miles, where too many sounds were being instanced at once.

Fixed a crash to handle a rare, but valid, case where a fleet is involved in 2 merges.

Fixed a multi-invasion crash that appeared to the user as a stuck turn.

Fixed a stuck turn in reference to a constructor moving to a full starbase, the AI no longer stalls at this point.

Fixed another stuck turn, where the AI was stalling on multi-invasion.

Fixed an instance where trapping an enemy ship, would stall the game.

Fixed a stuck turn where 2 fleets attack a defended planet and the second one can't execute the battle.

Fixes:

Fixed a culture radius oddity(Greatly appreciate the save files in reference to this issue.)

Fixed the anomaly rewarded survey ships not surveying. (Rest assured the previous pilots have been fired and the ships will now survey as intended.)

Fixed three instances where ship icons were not being displayed for ships.

Personal Notes/Comments:

Thank you to the testers for providing your files so that we could track down the issues that you are seeing in the game. (Especially in reference to that influence issue.)

Please feel free to create a post/send a ticket to support so that we can continue to address the issues that you are seeing out there.

Reviews

“One of the greatest 4X games of all time finally gets a follow-up”
PC Gamer

“I had a really good time with it. I got sucked into the "one more turn" mentality for hours.”
Escapist

“The sci-fi setting, highly-detailed ships, and immersive galaxies take the game a step above the current competition.”
Gamerant

Design your own ships!

About This Game

Galactic Civilizations III is the premier space strategy game. The latest installment of one of the highest-rated strategy series of all time, created by the original developers at Stardock, Galactic Civilizations III challenges players to build an empire that dominates the galaxy through conquest, diplomacy, cultural hegemony, or scientific research.

The stars are yours, if you can balance the demands of expansion, exploration, diplomacy, and all-but-inevitable galactic warfare. Careful strategy, not twitch reflexes, lead to victory in this turn-based strategy epic.

Online multiplayer comes to Galactic Civilizations for the first time in Galactic Civilizations III. Conquer the galaxy alongside your friends or battle for supremacy in titanic clashes.

On a note this game is still in beta/early access at the time of this writing - Beta 4

I see a lot of negativity on this game concerning "boring" or "slow paced" and "hard to understand/play" this game feels to me more like a throw back to the earlier 4x type games and to me is a refreshing reminder of the style of games that we once played. With this in mind I was able to load it up for the first time and jump straight into game play without much of a learning curve. It reminds me so much of what I liked about the games of yesterday.

There are nicely renedered cutscenes which lends to the overall grand scale atmosphere of the game. Animations are smooth and the units are clear and easy to distinguish fom each other.

There is a custom ship design screen where you can change the appearance of the ship. A vast tech tree to climb, and for those who like to micromanage planetary economics it offers enough control that you may do so.

Lastly of course this game is still in development and has much room for improvement, with that said for a beta it is relativly complete but not without its issues. As always Early Access means that there will be some issues with the game that are not yet resolved and maybe some features missing but overall it seems like it is on a very good path.

After all the features in Stardrive this games seems really simplistic and outdated.

Early Access Game so ballance issues like Beam weapons > all and Production/Food > all can be ignored.... but make the game very dull as you only every build 2 structures and space combat is instantanious and one sided.

Ship design tool is interesting but in practice its just cosmetic and in most cases the module selection is game breaking.eg 1 ship left docked with 30x sensors installed Covers the map and makes scouts and sensor modules/tech obsolite.There is no upside to using the ship design tool, you can make a box and put all the guns on top of each other and the ship performs as well as any other ship.

I bought this game the day it came out almost, quite harsh and alot of the old reviews were (in a few cases still are though no where near when it started) really buggy. Some times you were happy to play a half hour at a time. The fan base for this game though is such that it is develouping faster than I expected. Mostly due to the fact that this is one of the devs flagship games and they take the fans serious.

The game is very much what you would expect from the series. I was hopingg the dread lords would become a playable character with a new uber antagonist replacing them, its still in develoupment though so crossing my fingers. All the origonal playable characters are still there (Currently still 2 to be released). They all now "feel" like self realised races though and not just stat bonuses and a spattering of race only techs.

Alot of the reviews in the negatives for this game was for the fact that they put it up for sale not long after the release. A fact that has nothing to do with the game and is all about the customer. Its a shame really how hurt this games reviews are due to that.

So here I am 7 months into the game develoupment now. Paided full price, was not upset about the sale as I being a reasoned adult know that means more people on the game helping the DEV's. From what I seen so far I give 4.5 out of 5. My ownly complaint being no new races. If you liked GC2 Your going to love what this game appears to promise on compleation.

This game takes space exploration to a new level! Highly recomended if you are into strategic games like Civ V or Galactic Civ II.

I only wish they could have a Hybrid or simultaneous turn change, so we can move and play at the same time because waiting for the other player to finish is a little boring. It helps that I have Netflix so I can watch that whilst playing, but it takes away from the games atmosphere.

All and all a great game, note it is in Beta so all the bugs and stuff will most likely be fixed.

P.S. I don't understand how to mine, hopefuly it will be implemented in a more user friendly fasion.

I've got a ton of hours on both Gal Civ II and Gal Civ III. I'm a sucker for the 'Just 1 more turn' core loop. The beta has played solid on my 3 year old machine. It would play much better if I had more than 8 GB of RAM. I love the huge maps and that doesn't make it easy for my old box. As a stats-watcher from II, its been a struggle to adapt to playing III without having all the charts and graphs. Each update is a step forward, but I've got to slow down a bit or I'll be burned out before the full version launches. After 100+ hours, I'm always looking for the next update!

This game is coming along very well. They've taken much of what worked from the old game, and are adding in some simple and powerful improvements to make the new game better. It's nice to see that game developers do not have to start from scratch every time!

I just started playing and im simply amazed by the level of detail the planets, stars and ships have. Its simply amazing and beautiful when I discover a new star, only to find that it has a habitable planet orbiting it. It amazes me and makes me feel exited when I see black holes and nebulas in incredible details. You can even see lightning in dust clouds. Your advisers are extremely well animated, and diplomacy screens are also incredible. The game simply looks amazing, and thats already a very big plus. As to the gameplay, I haven't played it enough, but its very solid and reminds me alot of Galactic Civilizations II.

So far GCIII is GCII on steriods. It took 472 turns in an imense, spiral galaxy to win an ascension victroy in easy mode. The game froze up a couple times, I was either away from the game too long, or it's my videocard. I had no battles, so I never used that side of the game. Occassionally a starbase would not show the ships to be built, but built them just the same. World builting mechanics work fine. Tedious. My kind of game. :) .bwj...

Let me start by saying I love the old school strategy games. I also loved Galatic Civ II and still play it occasionally. With that said, I've just been playing beta 4 at this point, but it is oh soooo addictive! I can't wait for the final release.

In my first hour I colonized a new world (overrun with massive space worms), fought pirates and encoutered a race of space faring squirrels. I've had to decide how to handle potentially dangerous indigenous species (sorry, my colonists come first), skirted black holes, and found old serviceable warships in the ruins of ancient battles.

When it's fully implemented and the kinks have been worked out, I'm sure it will be a great game. But if you're looking for the most fun right now, Just keep playing GalCiv II.

There are quite a few features that you might expect would be implemented considering this is a 'late' beta that aren't, not to mention quite a few balancing issues that need to be ironed out.

An example of the balancing issues - in my most recent game, I was behind the most powerful AI by quite a bit in terms of territory and military strength. He had actually declared war on me even though he could not yet reach any of my territory. Eventually, however, I was able to work up strong enough an economy that I was bringing in quite a bit of cash. In this release of the game, the AI is much more receptive to trading than in GalCiv 2... A little too receptive. I managed to pass a law thru the council that ended all wars for x turns, and bought out his entire military for pocket change.. Basically winning the game for me with one move.

.. So yeah, they're doing a good job, but it's not, in my opinion, where it should be at this stage just before release. I say give it some time before making the purchase, or wait for it to go on sale again.

It's in beta but they said themselves that all it needs is a bit of polish and such, but it feels far from that. They are releasing this game in may but this game feels quite far from 2 months release in terms of content. I am 100% sure with time the game will be great though. This game is not worth $50. I bought it for $25 but it still feels like a rip off.

The game lacks content, a lot of content. There's not much to do, there's barely any variety and the game is unnecessarily tedious and unclear in some parts.

-Research is very unorganized in my opinion, it could be done so much better, and you will have trouble navigating it at first, but at least there is a tech tree to look at. Read it, study it and get accustomed to it and it will be easier for you.

-The map as a whole is just boring and lackluster. For a space game I expect an amazing, vibrant, colorful map. I expect the devs to go crazy with the aesthetic of the map but this is really basic. It has no character whatsoever.

-The planet building screen is a complete joke, it's very embarassing. It looks and feels like something from 1995. They could have done so much with this and make it amazing, EASILY, but unfortunately not.

-Diplomacy has three options. War, trade, peace. That's pretty much it. Along with this, is that the factions have NO character and personality whatsoever and are all generic and boring.

-It's quite unclear in some areas. Since there is no tutorial and a severe lack of internet threads on this game, you pretty much have to figure everything out for yourself.

-On some tooltips the words are a bit hidden because the box that they're written in is too small for the words to be placed in. It's quite annoying.

-The AI always rushes militairy even on the lowest difficulty and proceeds to have more than 5x your points. On top of that, the AI is bad. The biggest problem with 4x games is the AI, and this is no exception.

-Planets are somewhat cool especially the extreme planets and the planets with extra stats, but there is a lacking variety of them. Small planets are always dead and massive planets are always dead. I wish there was more to work with in terms of variety, and on top of that I wish that the planets had more character to them. They are all the same except for the stats.

-The game as a whole has no charm. It's very lackluster and generic. It's got no wow factor like distant worlds universe, endless space, etc. I tried very hard to like it but it has nothing special about it.

Pros

-The way you acquire ideology points through somewhat random events that give you options to choose is pretty cool, but it get's stale. Pretty much the same thing to what Civilization Beyond Earth did, but a bit better.

-Starbases are pretty fun to setup I guess. You build so many of them that they get to be annoying though.

-Combat is good. One of the only things holding it up.

-Ship designs are good, obviously.

-I'm sure there's more but this game is so un-memorable that I forget.

Just so you know. I've played all of the previous Galactic Civ series and all of the Master Orions before that. This is the succcessor to those and it shows. While the game is still in beta, it certainly playable and new things are being finished/adjusted and added regularly. Going to 64 bit only has really allowed them to make immense glaxay settings available, so much so that you can't get all of the possible galaxy on a 1920x1080 monitor at once. :)

Many things are similar or familar but with tweaks. Most obvious first change is that the game map is now hexagon based. The tech trees are per race, and there are big differences per race. As another reviewer noted, it's easier to build your colonies with automated updates, but as they now give bonuses for similar neighbooring improvements so careful planning can be game changing.

You have significant off planets things to mine or harvest- asension crystals, artifacts, resources and asteriods (although asteroid mining isn't implemented as of Beta 4). Grabbing these can also make a large difference in the game, depending on your play style.

6 or 7 different ways to triumph, including a turn limit/overall score mode, make this version potentially superior to the previous ones replayibility and variety.

The beta isn't polished or complete, but is worth having. Oh, did I mention multiplayer? Haven't tried it yet, but should be interesting to see how they keep it moving.

Buy this. The nice thing is that Stardock has a great history of continuing development (not just bug fixes) way past the point more rational developers would start making the next version. You can tell that this a labor of love.

I really love this game. It has great potential to be played for many of hours. Civ 5 is my alltime favorite and this game is very similiar with city management and not letting it get too complicated. The game still lags bad on my pc and occasionaly will freeze for about 5 mins so best to wait till launch before buying. But in all it is still very fun to play untill the maps and ship counts get so large the system bogs down, then i just tinker in the ship building for awhile. ship building without a tutorial is complicated so i hope that is something they will add at launch but i enjoy crudly pasting peices togethor to make something diffrent. So in short this game is good 7 out of 10 but could be my all time favorite TBS 4X game ever once the bugs and crashes get fixed. Good job everyone working on the game and keep up the good work.

P.S. i dont totally under stand how to post this to the discussions board but a usefull tip would be to add atleast an 1/8th of an inch gap to the rows in the tech menus. them being stacked just makes it fell like your choices are all simialar and being slightly seperated would help that.

GalCiv3 is probably in my opinion the best 4x to come to market in years, not simply because its actually going to be a finished product for once but because i've never come across a more social group of dev's who literally do their very best to give you what feels like a personal experiance when it comes to dealing with any problems you come across in game, and weekly dev stream's that you can ask them questions during, and even take on board your thoughts and idea's when it comes to building a better game for the community.

The Pro's- Amazing Customer Support.- It's getting better with ever new patch.- Easy to understand UI.- Easy to pick up for a first timer, or veteran of 4x Games.- Great graphics, and performance- Seriously addictive, you'll easily waste hundreds of hours of time into this once its out of beta.- They are pushing the 4x Genre to its limits with insane map sizes.

The Cons- I guess for some spending alot of time on this because its addictive :-D- Lack of sleep.

Yeah i dont really have any concerns or con's when it comes to GalCiv3. I had issues before and both times i had help within an hour from a dev to try and help me/them get to the route cause of the problem. The only con i can really think of is if you watch the dev streams you might be jelous of the fact paul gets to play with some cool features that are not stable enough to be released or are still in developement stages. 10/10 i paid 100 dollars to be a founder and its honestly the best money i ever spent would happily have spend double that.

First of all it is critical to understand that the game is still in beta testing and therefore has some glitches. That said it has been pretty stable for me. (Four year old dell xps 8100 with 16gb and a 750 Ti video card). At present the plan seems to be to a go for a final release in May. There will be frequent patches before then and perhaps a beta 6 release (beta 5, with enormous additions, was released yesterday (Mar26). If you don't like encountering bugs and reporting them to help the game, then wait for the release. Of critical importance remaining is tuning the AI to be smarter and more aggressive, imo.

That said, with yesterday's release the game is really starting to take shape. I played and enjoyed Galciv2 (for which, coincidentally, a community update is being finished at the same time). But GC3, even a couple of releases ago, just looks so much better, and the game will optionally be so much bigger (largest size is "insane" and it is just that, largest number of factions...100!) with many more custom races allowed, more minor races and a much improved ship designer (which is a game in itself that one can get lost in). Colonizing of planets is more tactical with the new adjacency bonuses and on planet resources. The battle viewer will remain a strategic choice rather than a tactical (one can organize one's fleet with different numbers and classes of ships, of which support ships are critical) but it also looks much better than GC2. You can change camera viewing angle during the battle. Watch a 30 vs 30 ship battle, enough said (check stardock.com to see live stream game examples). Then there are various galactic items like nebulae which restrict defence and accuracy as well as numerous strategic resouces to mine in addition to relics that give civilization wide benefits. The ideology table gives some sharply different choices depending on whether you feel good, bad, or neutral. Diplomacy is rapidly improving but has some way to go (as I said) and will I think be a key to success in a big game.

Well, I could to on and on. I am a long term 4x player (started with civ 1 in the day) and my advice is that this game will give a 4x challenge that feels, looks, and plays much different from, say, Civ 5, but with the same next turn tension and the same scramble for multiple objectives that makes a 4x game enjoyable.

I have never played any of the previous editions of this game; however, I have been playing this game which is still in beta since August 2014.

I have been extremely impressed with how well the developers have improved the game play and added new features and options. They provide weekly Dev Streams where the lead designer demonstrates the capabilities of the game, explains their development intentions, and answers questions from the audience. Copies of the Dev Streams are available for viewing on YouTube.

So far, I have submitted over 24 bug reports and Stardock support has been very quick to respond to each of them. Most of the issues I raised have already been resolved via game updates or hotfixes.

The game is 64-bit and therefore will demand more than 2 GB of RAM to operate. How much memory is used depends primarily on how big the map is. On my PC, a small map starts using about 1.7 GB, a huge map starts with about 3.1 GB, while the insane map starts running at about 4.1 GB. Please note that this is about 50% less than what the game was using three months ago with smaller maps and the developers have not finished optimizing it.

I find the game exciting to play, especially in the beginning phase. However, it becomes tedious when my empire approaches 100 planets with only a third of the map explored. Towards the middle of the game it is downright boring due to the number of repetitive tasks (e.g., starbase improvements) and a passive AI. The developers are working to address these issues but they still have a long way to go.

The game has multi-player capability but this option is broken in my opinion. I suspect this may be due to how the background calculations are transmitted between players since most of the game freezes and crashes occur during the handoff to another player. I look forward to Stardock resolving this issue.

If you want to participate in developing what may be the premiere space 4X game of the decade then I recommend you join in the fun, and frustrations. If you dislike things breaking for no apparent reason or desire a fully implemented game then I suggest you place this game on your wishlist.

This game is overall a lot of fun and quite interesting to play. Here are some pros and cons:PROS: -Game is intricate, really deep-its fun-I love the vastness of the game-interesting civilzations-good diplomacy

CONS:-All of the AI expand very aggresively. I wish this would be toned down.-Crashes sometimes-nobody ever wants a peace treaty. no matter what i do with it.-planets are incredibly expensive-No tutorial

This game is currently in beta and is already very promising. I used to "play" galactic civ 2 ("played" because i never had any idea what i was doing) and i loved it. Pretty excited to see where this goes.